I wouldn’t take back the drugs, but there are a few boyfriends that I’d edit out of my life.

I wouldn’t marry anybody until I met Anna.

On BBC Breakfast, I accidentally said “fuck” on air. My microphone had been turned on when I wasn’t in the room. It went out across the telly and they had to apologise.

I should have known that I might not like what my brain scan showed, just as I should have known that the symptoms of prostatism that were increasingly bothering me were just as likely to be caused by cancer as by the benign prostatic enlargement that happens in most men as they age. But I continued to think that illness happened to patients and not to doctors, even though I was now retired. Twenty months after I had my brain scanned, I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. I had had typical symptoms for years, steadily getting worse, but it took me a long time before I could bring myself to ask for help. I thought I was being stoical when in reality I was being a coward. I simply couldn’t believe the diagnosis at first, so deeply ingrained was my denial.

Not being at peace with myself, in spite of an ongoing lifetime effort to try to calm down and accept that, no matter what, I did the best I could.

Less work, more living.

To my father, for not telling him the truth when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and going along with the family lie that he had hepatitis, when he knew he didn’t. At the age of 17, I lacked the courage and strength to stand up for what I believed.

Citizens around the world blaming others for their personal disappointments, othering them, labelling them, terrorising them with hate-filled rhetoric and shutting the doors of their hearts.

Love is a religious experience, which then requires me to define religion, which I define as everything I don’t understand.